VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1
How to Put Out the Fire
You came over from Volume I, Despair, in a panic, all the way, didn't you. Stand still first. Only once you are standing can we talk about what comes after. This chapter is that standing still first. The fire of Volume I has reached you. You are still alive, but it has left you covered in burns, and inside you have gone cold. This chapter is here to save you. It is first aid. It is the starting point of this whole volume, written for people who are in the fire right now. No theory, no talk of institutions. It does only the one thing that matters most: to get you, the person, back alive, back steady, and back out the door. Six sections, six ladles of water, poured one ladle at a time to put out the fire on you. From you will not die, to you are a champion, to you were not laid off, you were let out, to as long as your eyes are open there is still time to turn. Each section hands you only a sentence or two that you can carry in your chest tonight, and each one lifts you a little higher than the one before. The fire out, your breath even, your eyes open, and then we set out.
Section One starts at the moment you clicked that link and came over from Volume I. You have gone cold inside, and you are thinking you are finished. This section tells you only one thing, simple enough that you see it the moment you think about it: every law there has ever been, from the oldest of times until now, protects people, not machines. When a machine breaks, money settles it. When a person is gone, it is the gravest thing there is. However clever AI is, it is only a tool, like the hoe, the calculator, the car, and its position has not moved half a step. If a hoe drove the farmer who carries it off his own field, the one in the wrong would not be the farmer. The law is not wrong either. What is wrong is a group of people sitting in the seats where the law is handled. They watched AI pass the bar exam and the medical boards, nodded, and let it up into a person's seat, forgetting completely that a license was only ever granted to a living person who can answer for what goes wrong. People nodded it in, so people can shake their heads and turn it back. What you lost is the work, not you, the person. This section hands you three words: you will not die.
Section Two starts with a three-year-old child. He does not work, does not earn, and by the measure of contribution he is a clean, round zero. Yet every meal someone feeds him, when he is sick someone sits up all night beside him, and he is given what he needs. If anyone said this child should not be raised, you would be the first on your feet, calling him something less than human. That reaction is the most honest scale in your chest: a person is not measured, for the right to live, by useful or useless. And you? You are a person too. The child is kept safe, and you are pushed into a corner, not because you do not deserve it, but because the system that was meant to catch you has snapped and leaked at your end, and people set it wrong. This section helps you tell real heaven from false heaven. Aging, sickness, and death are real heaven. No job means you deserve to starve is a false heaven that people made. People can prevail over fate, and the fate they prevail over is exactly that false heaven. At the end it hands you one line: you do not earn the right to live by being useful; being a person is enough. Then stand up, first help yourself, then help others.
Section Three is done arguing. It wants you to lift your head and see clearly who you are. You probably feel like scrap, sorted out and thrown away by the machine. But that one time, with your mother and father, hundreds of millions of sperm raced for a single egg, and only one broke through that door and lived. That one is you. Before your eyes even opened, you had already won the biggest fight of your whole life. After that came learning to walk, school, exams, heartbreak, being turned down for jobs. Every hurdle, when it arrived, was unprecedented, and not one slipped past you. You carried through every one. Robinson Crusoe lived alone on a deserted island for twenty-eight years. Next to him, you are rich as a king. Staying alive is how you win. Staying alive is the most defiant thing there is. The scheme that wants to drive you into the ground miscalculated exactly one thing, this life of yours. This section hands you this: you are still alive today, so you are already a champion.
Section Four shows you the road. You say there is no road because your eyes hold only that one job. But when you earn money, what you want is not the money. It is what is on the far side of the bridge, a bowl of rice, a coat, a roof over your head. Things are made by work, and money is only a ticket for dividing them up. All of humanity's suffering, across thousands of years, comes down at the root to one cause: there was not enough. Now, for the first time, it has flipped. For the first time, there is enough. Turn over the rice cooker, the TV, the electric car in your home and look at the back: Made in China. That is not overcapacity. It is someone pushing the price down to almost nothing but cost, and handing the surplus back to ordinary people all over the world. The same machines doing all the work, and the road in Volume I is a dead road, while this one is a living road, and someone is already walking it where you can see. As for why your share would ever reach you, this section does not lie to you: that takes the chapters ahead to lay out, slowly. Tonight, just hold four words steady: there is a road.
Section Five asks you one question: what is a job, really? At six you were handed into school, in at a fixed hour, out at a fixed hour. When you came out you were handed into work, clocking in, working late, putting in a request to take a day, and you stayed forty years. One prison after another. Why lock people up like this? Because there was not enough, and if you did not work you starved. That is called forced labor, and put plainly it is slavery, the iron rule for thousands of years. Now there is enough, and that root reason is gone. So you were not laid off, you were let out. This section does not coax you either. A person never escapes prison in this whole life. The cruise ship is one, the four walls are one, and that coffin at the end is one too. But a prison you choose yourself is not a cell. Go somewhere with good scenery and sell some water, carry some bags, because you feel like it. Once you settle in, you will not come out to grab and fight, and the old script of the first three rounds, where idle people were shipped off to war, does not have to be performed this time. At the end it hands you this: you are among the first people in thousands of years to be let out.
Section Six sends you out the door. First it helps you tuck the five things from before away, then it settles an old account. Machines replacing people, this is the fourth time. The steam engine roared, the power lines went up, the computer arrived, and every time a great mass of people fell idle and were shipped off to war to burn each other up. Time after time, in the tens of millions, about a hundred million people in all went down across the three rounds. The system is always half a beat behind, adjusted only after the people are gone, and the opening drew tighter each round. This time, the fourth fire has already started, and in advance is already too late. This section will not hand you pretty words. What can still be fought for is keeping pace: the machine runs, and the system runs alongside it, adjusting as it runs. It is hard, and there is no certainty in it, but this time there is one great difference. Your eyes are open. With your eyes open, there is still time to make this turn in peace, before the road runs black. The road is yours to walk, and the fighting is yours, together with the millions of others who have also seen clearly.
What this chapter sets on its feet is you, the person. You will not die, you deserve to live, you are a champion, there is a road, you were let out, your eyes are open. The fire is out. Stand up. The next chapter is A New Order for Culture. With the fire out, that chapter takes up education: culture is handing down, raising people stands on two legs, character education cures the sickness of torment in this world, and science education gives character a clear pair of eyes. First we warm people's hearts back up, then we go on.
Contents of This Chapter
One. The Law Protects People, Not Machines
Two. You Are a Person, and Every Law on Earth Is There to Protect You
Three. You Are Still Alive Today, Which Makes You a Champion
Four. There Was Never Only One Road
Five. You Were Not Laid Off, You Were Let Out
Six. The Fire Has Already Started, but There Is Still Time
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.